This course is offered through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Colorado State University. You must be a member of Osher to enroll in this course.

The history of the common carp in North America has been largely forgotten even though the carp swims in just about every waterway in the country. Today the carp is a value-less non-entity or pest, and a shadowy inhabitant of urban park ponds and polluted lakes and rivers.

Most who encounter carp don’t think much of them, unless they feel revulsion. If they notice carp, they see only an ugly bottom-feeder, classed with suckers, chubs, and other primordial fishes of little interest, aesthetic, economic, or otherwise. Anglers and scientists denigrate the fish as "foul-tasting," as ugly, as "biological pollution" and, most conspicuously, as a "trash fish."

This presentation tells the story of one of North America’s (and the world’s) most notorious invasive species from a light-hearted and sympathetic point of view.

Noncredit courses do not produce academic credit nor appear on a Colorado State University academic transcript.

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